大象传媒

Faith

MAN: Get the tissue.

PRESENTER: Oh my goodness.

SIMON METCALFE: It's a unique object.

PRESENTER: It's covered in diamonds.

SIMON METCALFE: Yeah, seven hundred and nineteen diamonds, set in gold with blue and green enamel.

NARRATOR: From the jewel encrusted scabbard and sword presented to King Edward the Seventh, to one of the oldest objects in the royal collection.

WOMAN: It was possibly made for the Coronation of either Henry the Second or Richard the Second, but we don't know exactly. You can see from the shape and size of it that it was never a domestic spoon. It was never intended for eating or stirring or that sort of thing. It's obviously ceremonial.

NARRATOR: The art and artefacts collected by our kings and queens over a period spanning nearly a thousand years are not simply wonderful objects, they also contain hidden truths. They reveal how the monarchy has survived and thrived. So far in this series I've seen private pictures and portraits from the royal collection which have exposed the real characters of our royal rulers. And I've looked at the objects that tell the story of how successful sovereigns know when to pick a fight and keep the peace. But what of matters more ethereal? Would the monarchy have survived without a relationship with the Almighty or at least with his representative on earth - the church.

MAN: There is still that sense that the church, the monarchy belong together in that rather elusive sense of standing for the wholeness of a society, standing for what lies beyond partisan, electoral politics, that gives some kind of body to the nation and its life. Both of them symbolise what's beyond just argument, what's simply there.

NARRATOR: In this programme I'll be going to Balmoral to see how Queen Victoria found her faith reflected in a Scottish glen and then to Windsor Castle to read an essay on religion by Henry the Eighth that made me realise I'd got him completely wrong. But let's start with our present monarch and her coronation.

REPORTER: And now is the moment when London first sees her Queen on coronation day, out from the forecourt, out through the wide gates comes that heart stirring wonder of the royal state coach. It comes ..

NARRATOR: The coronation ceremony is the confirmation of a British monarch which is much more than a simple piece of theatre or pageantry. It is where the monarch's contract with the people is cemented and the moment at which the future sovereign establishes his or her relationship with God.

SIR DAVID CANNADINE: Course it's very important to remember that historically and anthropologically monarchs have often been expected to be gods or close to being gods as well as secular rulers.

NARRATOR: Sir David Cannadine, Professor of History at Princeton University.

SIR DAVID CANNADINE: And the coronation of the British monarch is I suppose a slightly watered down and attenuated version of that earlier iteration of the monarch either being a god or ruling by divine right. So the accoutrements of religion are still in many ways essential to the functioning of the British monarchy.

NARRATOR: Which means seeing as well as believing. There has to be material evidence of the monarch's commitment to God, a signed contract.

LADY ROBERTS: The case is beautifully decorated in gilt and red with the words "Elizabeth Regina".

NARRATOR: I'm at Westminster Abbey with the Royal Librarian Lady Roberts. She is about to show me a truly unique object which has only ever had one careful owner.

LADY ROBERTS: This is the pen with which the Queen signed her coronation oath.

PRESENTER: That is not what I was expecting. It looks like a very grand paper knife with a nib. So I'm now holding the pen with which the Queen, Elizabeth the Second signed the coronation oath and it's actually a rather beautifully balanced object. It's not something you'd put in your inside pocket and use every day. It is a really fine piece of decorative arts work. It's got an ivory handle. It's, in the centre is a gold sword.

LADY ROBERTS: And then a crown with enamelled and small precious stones around the rim. The stem says "ER". Then you have the pelican in his piety.

PRESENTER: What is she signing up to?

LADY ROBERTS: She's signing up to a great many things which are both spiritual and temporal.

MAN: This is both an oath and a religious undertaking before God in a church. But there is also a sense in which it's a contract as well that the Queen agrees to take on this job if I can put it that way and the indication of the fact that it's a kind of legal contract as well as a religious oath is the fact that she signs this contract with the pen that is one of the most significant artefacts from the time of her coronation.

LADY ROBERTS: I think that her signature at the bottom of the document is not quite as fluent as it would have been if she had been used to using this pen. I think it looks as if she had a little bit of difficulty using it.

PRESENTER: She had a couple of goes at it maybe.

LADY ROBERTS: Yeah.

PRESENTER: This year Queen Elizabeth the Second celebrates her Diamond Jubilee. It's nearly sixty years since she picked up the ivory handled pen and signed the coronation oath in Westminster Abbey. In the context of an individual's rule that might appear to be a long time ago. But it's not when considered in terms of our monarchy's history as I discovered when I came across one of the most sacred items in the royal collection. The Windsors, the Tudors and even the Plantagenets have knelt before it. I'm in the Tower of London with the crown jewels. Among the diamonds and the cabinets full of gold plate is a dessert spoon that dates back to the twelfth century. Beside it is a small golden flask shaped like an eagle. This is the ampulla that was used at the coronation of Charles the Second. Together they form the apparatus of the most holy part of the coronation service, the anointing of the monarch. Catherine Jones is the curator of decorative arts at the royal collection.

CATHERINE JONES: They're part of the most sacred moment in the coronation ceremony so they really are the sort of high sacred point of that rite as it were. And without the anointing the monarch cannot be crowned. So they're highly significant from that point of view.

PRESENTER: The silver spoon which is covered in a thin layer of gold has been designed with a ridge dividing its bowl into two halves, the idea being I imagine to create a user friendly receptacle into which the anointing archbishop could dip his fingers. It's not the sort of object that the republican Cromwell much cared for and he might well have melted it down, a fate that befell many of the other treasures once held in the royal collection. But in this instance fortune favoured the spoon.

CATHERINE JONES: We think that the reason it survived is no one was exactly sure what its function was. It's listed in inventories in the fourteenth century as part of the regalia but nobody was quite sure how it performed because in theory you can anoint somebody straight, directly from the ampulla. You don't need the spoon and there are no other spoons known of this type. And they're not mentioned in any of the early accounts of coronations.

PRESENTER: So how can you trace it back to the twelfth century?

CATHERINE JONES: Purely stylistically. The design of the engraving and the techniques that were used to create the spoon are dated to that period.

PRESENTER: And when do you think it was first used, on what occasion?

CATHERINE JONES: It was possibly made for the coronation of either Henry the Second or Richard the Second. We don't know exactly.

ROWAN WILLIAMS: The anointing of the new monarch is one of the first big dramatic things that happens in the coronation service and it leads into all sorts of other things. In nineteen fifty three the Queen thought that the moment of anointing was so sacred that it should not be shown on television. It was something very, very person.

NARRATOR: The Archbishop of Canterbury Doctor Rowan Williams.

ROWAN WILLIAMS: And it's one of the oldest and one of the most distinctive features of the coronation ritual introduced first in Anglo Saxon times, probably an imitation of what was happening on the continent. But it carries on not only right through the middle ages but beyond that where other monarchies abandoned it. And it represented in the middle ages and afterwards a sense of I suppose a very personal vocation for the monarch, not just a status given but a vocation declared so that it treats the coronation something a bit like an ordination, the ordination of a priest or a bishop.

NARRATOR: For past sovereigns the spoon and the ampulla have acted as the conduits to a unification between the monarch and God that granted an unquestionable authority in which they believed and crucially so did everybody else

WOMAN: Originally it was intended that the person who was anointed became almost divine in their person and so it was highly symbolic and the traditional words are sung of Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king. Of course right up until the civil war the monarch was considered the lord's anointed on earth, literally divinely appointed to rule, so it was highly symbolic.

PRESENTER: Why do you think our monarchy retained it as part of the ritual?

ROWAN WILLIAMS: The sense of the monarchy has something to do with personal vocation and also with a specific kind of divine grace bound in with that. That matters a great deal in a monarchy establishing itself in a very divided society in the early middle ages both before and after the Norman Conquest. And I suppose for most of the middle ages it was just routine. But it had a real shot in the arm at the time of the reformation when all the Old Testament analogies were dug out again and the idea that the monarch was like the Godly kings of Israel became hugely important in the reign of Edward the Sixth especially. And although Elizabeth the First didn't approve of anointing at all and had some rather rude things to say about it, it was part of her identity too whether she liked it or not.

PRESENTER: What did Elizabeth the First have to say about it?

ROWAN WILLIAMS: She complained that the oil was smelly. It was the same oil that had been used for her sister's coronation and she wasn't impressed.

NARRATOR: In her coronation oath Queen Elizabeth the Second vowed to maintain in the United Kingdom the protestant reformed religion established by law. This was Henry the Eighth's legacy, to go along with his reputation as a wife-killing, overweight codpiece wearer who dissolved the monasteries, fell out with Rome and put England on the road to Protestantism. But hang on a minute there was another side to this so called Tudor tyrant. He was a scholar, an advocate of education and a passionate Catholic who commissioned the country's finest intellectuals to write a book defending Catholicism and what's more he dedicated it to the Pope. Henry's Assertio septum sacramentorum is now to be found in the care of Jane Roberts at the royal library at Windsor Castle. We'll come to the book in a moment but first ..

JANE ROBERTS: I think it very definitely is Henry's signature.

PRESENTER: It's quite florid isn't it?

JANE ROBERTS: It's very florid and you start with an H and you then move onto an E, N, R, Y.

NARRATOR: The small brown leather-bound book is almost five hundred years old, its paper in surprisingly good condition making it easy to see if not necessarily read the Latin text.

JANE ROBERTS: He was arguing about the sanctity of and the importance of the seven sacraments of the Catholic church. In this passage that we're looking at here there are printed marginal notes talking about Luther's pride and all the other heinous things that Luther was responsible for.

PRESENTER: It's a real polemic.

JANE ROBERTS: It is indeed. And it's full of very freely stated criticism of Luther including this passage here "Q... serp... umquam t... v... e..." which I think translates approximately as "What serpent so venomous has ever crept in".

PRESENTER: And what was Luther's response to this? Did he just take it on the chin?

JANE ROBERTS: Luther countered by publishing various other polemics against Henry in which he described the King as an ass, a pig, a drunkard and a dreamer.

PROFESSOR SIR DERMOT MCCULLOUGH: I think Henry was just horrified by Luther's whole approach to religion.

NARRATOR: Professor Sir Dermot McCullough, historian of the church at Oxford University.

PROFESSOR SIR DERMOT MCCULLOUGH: Henry was a very traditional thinker and he thought of himself as the most devout son of the church there could be, after all God had put him on the throne, God put his father on the throne. And so God would be angry if Henry didn't defend the traditional church. I don't think Henry wrote it. I think it was his idea and I think he took a keen interest throughout it and put his name on the end of course. But what he did was the very sensible thing to do, was to get all the best minds in Oxford and Cambridge and pay them a lot of money and get them to write it for him. And that's what kings should do it seems to me.

PRESENTER: And at this stage then, in fifteen twenty one, he had a good relationship with Rome, with the Pope?

PROFESSOR SIR DERMOT MCCULLOUGH: Henry had an excellent relationship with the Pope. The Pope of course was delighted that a European monarch should defend the Pope and the traditional church in this way and so he gave him a title, Defender of the Faith, fidei defensor.

NARRATOR: And that title is still used by the current monarch. Take a coin out of your pocket and have a look at the side on which the Queen's head is stamped. And there running along the outer perimeter you will see the initials "FD" standing for Fidei Defensor, a title that goes all the way back to this book, commissioned by Henry the Eighth and dedicated to Pope Leo the Tenth. The air of mutual respect and admiration between the King and the Vatican was soon to turn icy cold after the Pope refused to give Henry permission to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It made what had been quite a complicated history with the church a good deal trickier.

MAN: The church was in England before there was a monarchy. Now we have to remember that, that England is more or less created by the church. And when the kings of England came along they were very close to the church. So it's a very tangled relationship all through. What's fascinating I think is that in the middle ages to be English was to be the most loyal subjects of the Pope in Europe. There might be rows but in general the English thought of them self, prided themselves on being the Pope's most loyal children. And what Henry the Eighth did was to take Englishness and take it by the scruff of the neck and turn it round by a hundred and eighty degrees so that now, from now on to be English was to be the greatest enemy of the Pope in Europe and that's a fascinating sort of spin-doctoring of the Tudor monarchy.

NARRATOR: Henry's decision was to destabilise the monarchy for over a hundred years. Even while he was alive his self appointment to the role of Supreme Head of the Church of England was a high risk strategy given that many of his subjects remained sympathetic to Catholicism. The next century saw religious turbulence and dynastic in-fighting and the killing of a king.

LINDA COLLEY: I think the important point to remember is how fragile the royal succession in England/Britain is for a very long time.

NARRATOR: Professor Linda Colley from Princeton University.

LINDA COLLEY: You've got the civil wars in the sixteen forties and fifties. For eleven years, sixteen forty nine to sixteen sixty Britain is a republic. You then get the Stuarts returning. You then get another violent overthrow of dynasty in sixteen eighty eight, the so called glorious revolution. So for a long time the succession is in question. And one of the things that's making it in question is the whole religious issue.

NARRATOR: It was only with a dual rule of William and Mary that stability returned to the British monarchy. In what amounted to something akin to a latter day prenuptial agreement the joint sovereigns accepted a deal constructed by politicians in parliament that would lead ultimately to a constitutional monarchy.

JANE ROBERTS: Here we have a beautiful little book dating from sixteen eighty nine with a wonderful decorated leather cover decorated with very elaborate gold tooling.

NARRATOR: It was laid out in this document, the Order of Service for William and Mary's coronation in sixteen eighty nine which they duly signed, an action that was at least partially responsible for ensuring the British monarchy's long term survival. It is a hugely significant piece of historical evidence. Royal librarian Jane Roberts.

JANE ROBERTS: Inside the book there are about sixty pages with handwritten text - none of this is printed. And the text here is the equivalent of the draft for the Order of Service for the coronation of William and Mary in sixteen eighty nine.

PROFESSOR SIR DERMOT MCCULLOUGH: It was an extraordinarily successful compromise this. Parliament is involved in choosing the monarch and you might say parliament assented to the new monarch and that laid the foundations for a monarchy of ascent.

NARRATOR: Professor Sir Dermot McCullough.

PROFESSOR SIR DERMOT MCCULLOUGH: In the next century the absolute monarchy of France faced the rage of its nation and was destroyed. It had lost the contact of ascent which the English monarchy had kept. The great thing about this coronation oath was that it firmly committed the monarchy in the future to being protestant and linked the established church ever more tightly to the monarchy itself which is still there. It is a setting of ways for the future.

JANE ROBERTS: As you read this through it's fascinating to see how little the way that these things are handled and worded changes. Here we are, sixteen eighty nine, in nineteen fifty three many of the same words are used.

PRESENTER: I've just driven up from Edinburgh to Balmoral Castle. It takes about three and a half hours. It's a wonderful drive up into and through the Highlands, going over the ridge of Glenshee with the ski resort, pick up the River Dee which you follow all the way up through mountains and forests until you get to Balmoral Castle itself.

NARRATOR: Having explored how monarchs make their faith public I've now come to Balmoral Castle to look at a nineteenth century painting by Edwin Landseer. I want to know if it reveals any of Queen Victoria's private, spiritual contemplations.

PRESENTER: I've just come into the castle through the back entrance and into a reasonably small low ceilinged room called the Stewards Room where I see before me Deborah Clarke, a curator at the royal collection and in front of Deborah a painting by Landseer called The Sanctuary.

DEBORAH CLARKE: Queen Victoria actually bought it. She saw it at the Royal Academy Exhibition in eighteen forty two and in fact it had been bought by somebody else, a Mr Wells who was one of Landseer's greatest patrons. But ocne the Queen expressed interest then he had to step aside. And the Queen purchased it for Prince Albert for his birthday.

PRESENTER: It is a large landscape painting, cinematic in style I'd say, very evocative. It's feels like it's touched the sublime. It depicts a stag walking exhausted. Would you say that there is an expression of faith within this painting that would have appealed to Victoria?

DEBORAH CLARKE: Well I think so. I think the painting has a real spiritual sense about it. The stag is walking towards the East, this beautiful ethereal light to the sanctuary of the East to salvation. Interestingly the location of the loch where the stag is walking through is Loch Marie which is a loch on the West Coast of Scotland that's scattered with islands and some of these islands are associated with very early Christianity and they have ruins of very early churches on them. And I would imagine this would be known at the time.

MAN: Victoria and Albert interesting case here because she is the monarch and he is the consort at the time of enormous change. It's the era of Darwin creating a new view of how creation happened, lots of new views of the bible, Prince Albert, remarkably clever man and a German. Now protestant Germany had taken the lead in trying to find a way to reconcile science, the enlightenment and religion and it had done remarkably well. Luther in North Germany was the centre of a great university culture which was avowedly Christian and avowedly enlightened. And that's very much Albert. He's a serious protestant. And his wife who adored him became that sort of protestant. So Victoria is very devoutly convinced that she is God's agent on earth and that she's been chosen by God to be Queen. But she's not at all fazed by Darwin or scientific advance at all.

NARRATOR: So Victoria was comfortable with the new philosophies introduced by the enlightenment. But she might have been a bit taken aback by the next work of art from the royal collection. I was.

PRESENTER: I get to hold the sword?

MAN: Yes if you put on some plastic gloves. It's just really to stop ..

PRESENTER: For a nasty moment I thought you were going to ask me to do the washing up.

MAN: No that comes later.

PRESENTER: It's a sword and scabbard that dates back to nineteen O two and the coronation of Queen Victoria's son Edward the Seventh.

MAN: We just really wear these with all precious or metal objects to stop fingerprints causing acid damage to them.

NARRATOR: It was given to the King by the Maharaja of Jaipur who was unusual in that he was a non-Christian attending a coronation. You could argue that it signals the beginning of what was to be the by-product of the Victorian Empire which was a multi-faith Britain. What I have no doubt about is that it truly is one of the most spectacular objects I have ever seen.

PRESENTER: Oh my goodness, that is magnificent.

SIMON METCALFE: Well it's a unique object.

PRESENTER: It's covered in diamonds.

SIMON METCALFE: Yeah, set in gold with blue and green enamel. So there are seven hundred and nineteen diamonds.

NARRATOR: Simon Metcalfe is the royal armourer.

SIMON METCALFE: They range from these large lasque or flat diamonds, almost ten P in diameter and shape down to smaller but still substantial rose cut and brilliant diamonds with sort of facets on.

PRESENTER: I mean yes, I mean if you were just given one of these that would be quite a big deal.

SIMON METCALFE: Yes. In the European culture one of the things the sword is saying is I am defender of the faith for instance and I think that can be applied over to India as well. But it's also telling you, specially when you encrust it in diamonds, how important and powerful the person who's giving it to you is. There isn't another one like this sword so it's ..

PRESENTER: No it's extraordinary. So what does it tell us about the relationship that the Maharaja of Jaipur wanted to have with the British monarchy and to a certain extent vice versa?

SIMON METCALFE: I think it was a key relationship the Jaipur one because Edward visited most of India during his eighteen seventy five trip but only a small proportion of Indian princes were invited to the coronation.

SIR DAVID CANNADINE: One of the things that it's easy to forget is that the British Empire was a multicultural empire long before Britain itself became a multicultural nation.

NARRATOR: Professor Sir David Cannadine.

SIR DAVID CANNADINE: In the period before the Second World War the British monarch who was also of course head of the whole imperial show and Emperor or Empress of India was presiding over an empire, the majority of whose population was not Christian. So we now have in Britain a kind of concentrated microcosm of what had been the global multicultural empire. And that I think does seem to carry with it in some ways serious implications for the British monarchy which is still so closely tied to the established Church of England. And quite where that will go in future I have to say I'm not sure.

NARRATOR: The voting bell at the House of Lords rings out. I've come here to meet Lord Inderjit Singh, the first member to wear a turban. He represents a new era in the monarchy's relationship with religion. In the sixteenth century it was the King Henry the Eighth who insisted that the country become protestant. In the twenty first century it is a sovereign's subjects who are making the running and challenging if the monarch should be the defender of the faith or simply the defender of faith.

MAN: I think it's extremely important that the monarchy is in touch with all faiths. And to their credit they have been. They've been leading the way for many, many years. I take part in the Commonwealth service every year and I've been doing so for the last fifteen, sixteen years. And that is a multi-faith service in many senses. It's centred on the Christian service but there are contributions and readings from other people. And the monarchy has been giving a lead in this direction when it was unpopular or even unthought-of by others.

ROWAN WILLIAMS: I think that simply because the monarch and the church have that convening role it's crucial that they use it preciously to draw in other communities to make sure that they feel fully part of the national conversation.

NARRATOR: The Archbishop of Canterbury, Doctor Rowan Williams.

ROWAN WILLIAMS: I think that the Queen and the heir to the throne have both been very effective in doing just that in affirming minority communities, drawing them in. Certainly we in the Church of England have found more and more that that is a role we are expected to play by other communities and their leaders and I don't see that the role of the Church of England there is something that enshrines the exclusion of other faiths but rather on the contrary, in a way it gives them a seat at the table.

PRESENTER: Can you imagine the monarchy surviving if it were to become agnostic?

ROWAN WILLIAMS: I'm sure there've been monarchs in the past who haven't been completely convinced about every aspect of the ... creed let's say. But a monarchy that was publicly and institutionally agnostic, that was visibly at arm's length from every religious commitment and every religious institution would be an unrecognisably different thing.

PRESENTER: And survivable?

ROWAN WILLIAMS: I think that what we have, what has evolved seems to suit the kind of society we are.

NARRATOR: Six objects, six stories, one conclusion. Faith is still an important part to the art of monarchy. But as we've heard through the art and artefacts we've examined, it has always been a complex business and it continues to be so. God tends to be a good if challenging ally for a sovereign. In the next programme on the Art of Monarchy I will be donning my sunglasses and checking out the vital role that magnificence has played in sustaining the monarchy. We're talking glittering golden carriages, sumptuous silver tables and an opulence on a scale only George the Fourth could imagine.

PRESENTER: Everything is gold and then over here in the corner past the gold desk and a couple of other gold chairs and a gold screen and a gold fire guard you come to a golden framed mirror. Lavish doesn't quite do it justice.

END OF TRANSCRIPT